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Her finger pauses, and June looks up at me.
I’ve never told this story to anyone.
I nearly don’t tell it to her. It was years ago, but I know June knew me then and she remembers years ago. I was a weird, awkward teenager and I finally became a slightly less weird, less awkward adult and that feels hard-won.
“I made friends with the crows when I was in high school,” I tell her. “After dinner every night, it was my job to take the table scraps out to the compost in the back yard, behind my mom’s house. My parents’ house, then, and when I was about fourteen, I realized that every night, the crows would sit in the trees above the pile and wait for me. Then, when I left, they’d descend and feast.”
I clear my throat. June is dead silent, her pointer finger tapping on the first star in the constellation.
“So I started saving the best scraps for them. Stuff I thought they’d like, mostly meat. It was my dad’s idea, actually. He liked animals. I’d put the compost in the compost heap and then feed the crows right next to it so they wouldn’t have to dig through the trash.”
I’m staring through the windows across the room from me and I draw one knee up, rest an elbow on it, and despite everything, despite being thirty-two and having a good job and a master’s degree, despite owning the house that I built, despite having a beautiful woman naked in my head, I can’t stop thinking you’re a weirdo, Levi, you’re such a fucking weirdo.
“And they liked you,” she says, and she says it with no malice, not a hint of teasing in her voice, just pure…
…wonder. I think it might be wonder.
“They started bringing me things,” I say. “My father and I would walk out there at night, and they’d be sitting in the tree, and sometimes there would be something on the ground for us. And you know, usually it was some sort of shiny trash, a piece of bicycle reflector, a strip of aluminum, screws and bolts. But one time it was a watch. Another time it was a silver dollar.”
“The crows stole someone’s watch for you?” June says. “Holy shit.”
Finally, I look down at her, and I can’t help but laugh.
“It was pretty beat up, and it was a cheap watch to begin with,” I say. “But I kept it all the same. I kept everything the crows gave me. We were friends for two years. My father even tried to teach one to say Levi but it never really worked, they were too wild.”
“I wish it had worked,” June says, and now she’s laughing but it’s a good laugh, a sweet laugh. “Can you imagine hiking through the forest and a crow flies overhead and as it does, you just hear, ‘Levi…’”
“Now I’m even more glad it didn’t work,” I tell her.
“Why’d you stop? You went to college?”
“I stopped before that,” I say, and I pause. I clear my throat. “After Dad died. I didn’t mean to. I just never did it again.”
“Oh,” June says. She takes my hand, squeezes it between both of hers, and kisses me on the shoulder, and then she doesn’t say anything else.
I’m glad. I turn and kiss her on the top of her head and I’m so intensely glad that she says nothing except oh because, in the years that span his accident until now, I’ve heard every single condolence, every trite statement, every banal saying that comes out of peoples’ mouths about death. I’ve heard all of them and if I never hear another again, it’ll be too soon.
She was there, of course, in the aftermath, at the candlelight vigils and memorial services and the funeral and the dedication when Country Route 14 technically became Thomas Loveless Road, at the pancake breakfasts and luncheons. I don’t remember her specifically — she would have been thirteen, and I was sixteen and lost at sea — but I know she was there.
But I remember Silas. Silas who was, somehow, always there, always over at our house or making me come back to his. Silas who was the homecoming king and football star and who had, allegedly, already had sex with a sorority girl, but who spent hours holding me while I sobbed and never told a single solitary soul.
Silas, whose kindness I’ve repaid by bedding his little sister.
“Anyway, nine years later I let my brothers talk me into getting a constellation tattoo and I found this one,” I say. “I think it could be worse.”
“I like it,” June says. “It’s simple. Elegant. They could have talked you into flaming dice, or a naked chick.”
“I’m not sure they could have,” I tell her, and she laughs.
“What do the others have?” she asks. “You can’t just tell me there’s a list and then not tell me the list. I hate that. Like when you read that ‘poisonous snakes are the fourth deadliest animal in the U.S.’ and then the article doesn’t tell you the first three.”
